Dance Away with Me(33)

Rebecca cast a yearning look toward Wren. “How old is she?”

“Almost two weeks. She’s a preemie, but she’s doing well.”

With no warning and an almost inaudible choking sound, Rebecca turned away.

“Are you all right?” A stupid question. She obviously wasn’t.

“I have to stop crying. It upsets Paul and Eli.” She slowly turned back, tears tracking her cheeks. The way her eyes naturally turned down at the outer corners made her look even more vulnerable. “I had a miscarriage two months ago.”

Tess curled her hand over Rebecca’s arm. “I’m so sorry.”

“I was almost four months along.” She gazed at Wren. “I’ll get over it.”

The very words Tess had told herself so many times. “Grief seems to have its own timetable.”

“I’ve wanted another baby for years.” Rebecca tried to pull herself back together, but she couldn’t draw her eyes away from Wren. “You’re so lucky to have her.”

“She’s not mine. I’m only her temporary caretaker.”

“What do you mean?” Rebecca gestured toward the kitchen table, and after they were seated, Tess offered a much-abbreviated summary of what had happened. She did her best to be factual and steer clear of the emotional undercurrents, but by the time she was finished, Rebecca had once again begun to weep. “I’m so embarrassed to keep falling apart like this.

“I’ve fallen apart more than a few times myself.”

“What’s going to happen to that sweet baby?”

“She’ll be taken care of,” Tess said more firmly than she felt.

Rebecca tore her eyes from Wren and rose from the table. “Would you like some tea? I grow my own herbs.”

Tess wasn’t a big fan of herbal teas, but she accepted.

Eli came in while the tea was brewing. Tess checked his wound and saw it was healing well. He rushed back out to join the men. “Dad’s showing Ian the wind turbine.”

“It’s Paul’s newest project,” Rebecca said as the door slammed behind her son. She set a pair of matching mugs on the table and settled across from Tess. Behind her, bottles of various sizes and colors caught the light on the kitchen windowsill. “We’re not crazy, you know. We just want to be prepared.”

The tea smelled of lavender, rose hips, and lemongrass, all fragrances Tess loved but didn’t necessarily want to drink. She took a sip anyway. It was surprisingly delicious. Maybe she should stop prejudging. “Prepared for what?”

Rebecca gazed at Wren. “Once Eli was born, all I could think about was how precarious our existence is on this planet. Not only the litter and waste, the plastic clogging up our oceans, but crazy men with nuclear bombs, germs we can’t even identify, cyberattacks wiping out the country’s power grid. We decided that we had to take care of ourselves.”

Tess thought Rebecca’s palpable anxiety might be better handled by medication than this difficult lifestyle, but that was the judgmental part of her kicking in, and she said nothing.

*

“What do you think of them?” Tess asked Ian on the way back.

“Eli’s a great kid, and that speaks well of his parents. But Paul’s too much into government conspiracies for my taste. I don’t know how anybody with a brain can think our government is well organized enough to hide aliens or fake moon landings, let alone confiscate everyone’s guns. I’ll say this for the guy, though. He has an amazing skill set.”

They got back to the schoolhouse sooner than she would have liked. Being confined was making her stir-crazy. Despite the lousy pay and her obnoxious co-workers, she missed the Broken Chimney. She also hated leaving Phish short-staffed, even though he kept telling her to take the time she needed.

Ian had returned to clearing out the brush in the back. She wished she could curl up in bed and take a nap, but Wren wasn’t having it. As Tess bounced her in the sling, she investigated the bookcases. Not even the most fast-paced novel could hold her attention, but she discovered a splashy volume devoted to international street artists, another on the work of the British street artist Banksy, and a third titled IHN4: A Rebel’s Story. Beneath the title were the words, “How the son of one of America’s wealthiest families abandoned his heritage and elevated street art from gutters to galleries.”

Wren cried when Tess tried to sit, so she propped the book on the kitchen counter and read.

North spent his teen years as a conventional graffiti artist, vandalizing trains and subways. But as he matured, so did his vision. His youthful video game–inspired graphics gave way to more detailed, socially conscious work, some of it even whimsical, such as turning the iron grid on the side of a grocery into a zoo cage by pasting a herd of escaping wildebeests around it, or transforming the irregular bricks on a city wall into the missing front teeth of a child’s mouth.

More recently, he’s shown signs of disillusionment as art speculators purchase the actual walls where his work has shown up—buying them from the property owners, paying to have the buildings repaired, and then selling the works for vast profits, all without his permission.

She read about Ian’s family—his hostile, driven father, who’d died in a small plane crash, and his mother, a beautiful socialite with a pattern of self-destruction. Nothing was mentioned about her death, so she must have been alive at the time of publication.